Hi,

I want to get numbers like +1-213-2212324 (my number, please be aware that I'm in GMT+1 timezone) via SIP. In Germany we have big telcos which can pass us numbers from whole Germany because these numbers are routed like the packets on the Internet. So a telco from Hamburg can pass us numbers from Berlin, no problem.

But in the USA you may have a very differnt system. It seems to be impossible to get numbers (inbound routing) from every state. Do you have so much telephone companies who don't share those numbers with other telcos? Isn't a telco in Las Vegas able to pass their customers numbers from New York?

Background: I need a huge sum of numbers and don't know to whom I could talk, I think it may be a big telco like Sprint?

If you know a little bit (or more) about the telephone system in the USA I'd be very happy if you share your knowledge. Please keep in mind that I don't know a thing about how this thing works in the USA.

regards
Rolf

Talk to the business unit of the telco for that area. They can assign a phone number and redirect to another number. I'm doing this now because I moved my company out of the area it was in for 25 years and didn't wanna lose that phone no.

Can't Vonage do this already?

My intention is to get these call via VoIP over the Internet, so I can be where I want to be. But this seems to be not so common...

Rolf

Okay, here's a little bit of background on US telephone companies that might help you understand what you're up against.

There are two types of traditional telcos. Local service and long distance. The local service companies provide you with the physical line and access to other people in your local area, local being about a 50 mile radius. Usually you can use the phone for that purpose all you want in return for a static monthly fee. Then the long distance companies are who you deal with to call remote locations. They usually charge you per minute, and that cost usually varies depending on distance.

Usually there is a single local service telco for a given region, but there are probably six of them across the country. There are four or so major long distance companies. The local telco is the one that provides you your telephone number. Until a couple of years ago, there was no way to move a number from one location to another, and it only changed due to a legal mandate.

So, traditionally, there is not any single company you can go to to get phone numbers for all around the country. And the major companies still work very traditionally. I imagine that it's unlikely that you're going to be able to get any of them to provide you with a variety of local numbers. You can get them through "minor" telcos, but they're minor and you might not want to work with them. I don't know. I know we went over the state of VoIP providers before and you seem to have been unhappy with the conclusion we arrived at there.

All that being said, what is the purpose of wanting all of these local numbers? If the idea is that you want people in the US to be able to call you easily at your cost, you could look into getting an 800 number or toll-free number. That is, there are a number of special area codes in the US, namely 800, 888, 877, and 866, that allow anyone across the country to call you without having to pay any long-distance fees. Effectively, they automatically reverse the charges to the recipient of the call. This might be more what you're looking for, and is very traditional for businesses in the US.

Yeah, I knew all or most of that, but it isn't really relevant, and I thought I'd avoid confusing the issue more than it already is. When you get down to it, it's still the ILECs that control the phone numbers. They're just required to work as a distributor in addition to a retailer. And assuming that he doesn't want to deal with VoIP providers, I seriously doubt that he wants to deal with CLECs that aren't ILECs elsewhere. They're way less professional to deal with IME. And I doubt he's going to find any CLEC that's going to want to sell him one phone number from each area code.

Oh, another thing, Rolf. Just because a phone number is in the same area code as another does not mean that a call between them would be local. And, inversely, just because it's in another area code doesn't mean that it's long distance. For example, New York City has half a dozen area codes, if not more, but they're all local calls from within the city. But a call from Missoula, Montana to Glendive, Montana, about 500 miles apart, is probably going to be a long distance call, despite being in the same area code.

And to add more confusion, most cell phones these days have free long distance. It's no more expensive to call across the country with them than it is to call next door.

Wow, thank you! Now I'm a little bit less confused, but..

>The US Telephone system is amazingly convoluted and impossible to understand.

...this is true, oh yes! Ok, better I'll tell you what I want to do:

- Getting 1.000.000 numbers in sum of every existing destination (maybe on demand for customers)
- Providing VoIP services in the USA (worldwide, but we should start on one continent)

Next thing is: What could be better than your traditional landlines if you got DSL? I realized that VoIP calls can be of a much better quality compared to the traditional telephone. May $3.99 a month compare with traditional telcos? Some more features like redirection, mailbox and all the other neat things you can do with VoIP? Talking for 1 cent per minute in the whole USA and talk for free with your VoIP capable friends? Plugging in your VoIP phone in Hawaii and getting calls even when you are a thousand miles away from home?

Thank you al lot, this conversation is very important to me.
Oh, one more comment: I'm the one with visions not the one with money ;-).

Rolf

A traditional telco will charge about $35/month for unlimited service, not including long distance, and I would bet that this is what 75% of all people have.

For what you're wanting to do, I have no idea where to send you. A million numbers seems like overreaching, though. I also imagine that numbers are allocated dynamically or at least in small blocks, not in huge blocks, but I could be wrong.

Oh, here's something: How to start a Clec

Hmm, I should get a huge book about telcos, hide for a month reading and understanding the book and be ready for take off :-).

IAX support could be done if there are more than two or three people wanting this. Currently we offer only SIP due to the possible reinvite and the better speech quality when packets get to their destination at the shortest way (and of course due to the traffic which doen't kill our servers).

I understood the following if I'm right:

* ILECs are bigger companies than CLECs
* ILECs are for connection many CLECs together (long distance calls)
* DIDs are controlled by ILECs (why? thought the clecs would get e.g. 1-555-xxx-xxx and provide the rest themselfes like a net with a netmask for IP)
* A CLEC provides just one city (more or less)
* A CLEC has it's own physical wires (last mile)
* ILECs can rent long distance wires from other (bigger?) ILECs which have their own wires?
* A CLEC can be an ILEC, too.

* People pay $35/month for their telephone including city calls (everything which is supported by their CLEC and not using ILECs for long distance calls)

* Cellphones can have free long distance calls (at which monthly charge?)

* You can do a long distance call even when you call to the same region code and you can do a city call when using another region code (like New York city).



Besides of other things like 911 routing this is hard enough to compete with :-). I won't give up.

In Germany there are service numbers (+49 180 ...), I've heard that there are 411 numbers in the USA, could this be a number we could give our customers instead of real local numbers? Well, the rates for these numbers are a little bit higher but it works (9 to 12 cents a minute).

Rolf

Just to start off, the "I" in ILEC is for "incumbent" and the "C" in CLEC is for "competitive". That is intended to imply that the ILEC is the one that's "always" been there and the CLECs are coming in to take over some of their business.

To give you some more history that might help understanding this: Long ago, there was a single telephone company in the US: AT&T. It provided absolutely every service that you could get. In 1984, the US government decided that they could no longer have that monopoly, so they split the company into a number of pieces. AT&T would keep the long distance services, but other companies would be created to be the local carriers, called RBOCs or, colloquially, Baby Bells (due to AT&T being known as the Bell System, after Alexander Graham Bell). Seven RBOCs were created from AT&T's local holdings, one each for the southeast (BellSouth), the midwest (Ameritech), the mid-Atlantic (Bell Atlantic), the northeast (NYNEX), the west coast and southwest (Pacific Telesis), the southern central (Southwestern Bell), and northern central (US West) areas of the US. Those companies essentially had monopolies on those areas until many years later. At the same time as all of this, a few new companies emerged to compete with AT&T in the long distance market.

Since then, more deregulation and, thus, more competition, has emerged. Now virtually any company can provide any service, but the land lines are still owned by those original seven companies (except that they've been bought out and merged and split again numerous times since 1984, so few of those original names are still in use).

Quote:
* ILECs are bigger companies than CLECs

Generally speaking, ILECs are the biggest companies in the market, but an ILEC in one region may be a CLEC in another.

Quote:
* ILECs are for connection many CLECs together (long distance calls)

No, they are effectively the same thing, they just happen to own the lines that both ILECs and CLECs use. "LEC" stands for "local exchange carrier". All LECs provide local service and that's it. Long distance carriers are other companies altogether.

Quote:
* DIDs are controlled by ILECs (why? thought the clecs would get e.g. 1-555-xxx-xxx and provide the rest themselfes like a net with a netmask for IP)

I'm not sure how DIDs are initially determined, but it's very uncommon for a phone in a region to not have the same area code as all the other phones in the same region. Although some regions do have more than one area code assigned.

Quote:
* A CLEC provides just one city (more or less)

More than just a city. Usually an area spanning several states.

Quote:
* A CLEC has it's own physical wires (last mile)

Not usually, if ever. CLECs "rent" those lines from the ILECs.

Quote:
* ILECs can rent long distance wires from other (bigger?) ILECs which have their own wires?

ILECs own all the local wiring in their region. They are (logically) connected to all of the long distance providers who work as interconnects between all the LECs. I don't know how it's physically set up.

Quote:
* A CLEC can be an ILEC, too.

A CLEC providing service in a region other than its own is a CLEC in that other region.

Quote:
* People pay $35/month for their telephone including city calls (everything which is supported by their CLEC and not using ILECs for long distance calls)

To be clear, all of the LECs provide nothing more than local service. Any long distance service is provided by a long distance carrier, which is a separate service. (To make things more complicated, the LECs often actually will provide long distance service, but usually at exorbitant rates.)

Quote:
* Cellphones can have free long distance calls (at which monthly charge?)

I've not heard of a cell phone plan in ages that didn't provide free long distance. There are a huge variety of plans. Most of them are a flat monthly fee for a set number of airtime minutes, plus some fee for each minute you go over. A typical one might be $60 for 900 minutes.

Quote:
* You can do a long distance call even when you call to the same region code and you can do a city call when using another region code (like New York city).

Yes. It basically depends on the phone density of the area. Calls within the same city are probably always local calls, even if the city is dense enough to have multiple area codes, whereas a sparsely populated region might only need one area code to hold all the numbers for a huge area, but calls to a place far away may be considered long distance.

This brings up the question of how it can be long distance even if it's the same ILEC providing service. I honestly don't know how that's the case, or quite how it works. All I can say is that it is.

Yeah, but even then, I think that they're just parts of those original seven companies. On the other hand, there were competitive LECs back then, and I think they actually provided their own lines, as opposed to the leasing that goes on today. I bet that they were either in areas where everyone hated the RBOC or in areas that didn't have telephone service back then. I know it sounds absurd, but I heard of a place in the US getting phone service for the first time within the last few months. There were bound to be a lot more of those places in 1984.

Well, there were a number of non-Bell local exchange carriers throughout the history of the telephone in the US, GTE being the biggest. I suppose your Frontier Communications/Citizens Communications/Rochester Tel is just one of those.

BTW, Mink, LA is the town that just got phone service in early 2005.

Contel was another of those odd companies. They started late but still got big by buying up mom and pop local telcos, mostly in small towns all across the US. You might have a whole region that was PacSomething surrounding one town that was Contel.

I believe Verison wound up holding what was Contel.

SIP with STUN works fine, so even with NAT it should work.

BTW: Could someone explain me what special numbers exists like 1-800-.. or 1-700-.. ? Are there any numbers which are not dedicated to a special location like 1-800 but are not paid by the callee?

Rolf

Yes. 1-900 numbers are location independent and are paid by the caller, although they're associated with sex and psychic lines more than anthing else these days.

Ok, are there any other independent lines which are not so expensive? I could imagine that 1-900 are very high in costs when dialed.

Rolf

I don't know for sure, but I think the costs are determined by the company that owns the line. I'd imagine they could be as low or high as you want them to be.

900 numbers are used to charge money to the caller that is sent to the recipient of the call. It's basically a way to pay for a phone service without having to use a credit card. It could be used for out-of-warranty technical support, but, as John says, it's mostly used for phone sex and psychic predictions.

The only toll-free ones are 800, 888, 877, and 866, though I wouldn't be surprised to see more in the future. As I've explained, the caller pays nothing for the phone call and the recipient pays for it. I've never paid a toll-free bill, but I believe you generally have to pay a monthly fee for the number to be active, plus a per-minute charge that is probably about the same amount the callers would have paid for the same call if it were a normal long-distance call. If you're looking at giving these numbers to your subscribers, that's probably a bad idea. Toll-free numbers are pretty much exclusively used for businesses. While there's no rule that says that has to be the case, an individual with a toll-free personal number would be strange.

As far as I know, there are no other special area codes. Also, people wanting to get a phone number from you are going to want to get a number with a local area code.